Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  —Lizet, please, she said. Stay here. I don’t even want to know what’s gonna happen.

  —Then I won’t tell you. So you can see how it feels.

  —Fine, she said. Please, like there was anything you could even do from up there.

  She stood from the bed and slipped over to me, her arm slung under Dante’s diapered butt.

  —Don’t tell her I followed her before, she said.

  —You don’t think she saw you?

  —I know she didn’t. You’ll see why.

  I pulled my legs through the shorts and slipped into my flip-flops, but Leidy grabbed the top of my arm with her free hand. She said, You should wear real shoes. At least listen to me for that.

  She let go of my arm and swung Dante to her hip, saying as she left the room, Remember I tried to stop you.

  When I followed her out into the living room a couple minutes later, her eyes darted to my feet, where she saw I’d switched into socks and sneakers. She closed her eyes and mouthed the words, Thank god.

  —You should wear this, my mother said.

  She tossed me a flap of white material: a shirt with too many words in too many fonts. And down low—the shirt was an extra large, presumably the size needed to get all that information on it—was a big square iron-on of Ariel’s face, grainy and faded, his eyes closed and his hands folded by the side of his face. The shirt had a version of almost every Cuban-affiliated slogan I’d heard so far—CUBA SÍ, CASTRO NO; TO HELL WITH FIDEL—plus a new one: WE’LL REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!!

  —It’s too big for me, I said.

  —Just take it with you, Mami said. Wrap it around your waist or something.

  —Take it, Leidy said before drinking a long sip of coffee, Dante straddling her knees with his back to the dining table. He leaned forward, used her breasts as pillows, put his whole hand in his mouth.

  —Where did you even get this, I laughed.

  Mami turned and started rinsing off her coffee mug, then my already-washed glass of water from the previous night.

  Leidy cleared her throat and said, She made it, while slicing at the air across her neck with a flat hand. She’s made a bunch of them, she added while shaking her head no.

  —Oh, I said.

  I turned the shirt around to see the back: a black-and-white photo of a smiling Ariel and the words ARIEL NO SE VA!

  —It’s good! I said. It’s informative.

  Leidy put her coffee cup down and slapped her hand to her face. From outside came loud voices, women passing by.

  —We better go, Mami said into the sink. She turned around, wiping her hands with a dishcloth she then folded and returned to the counter. You ready? You sure?

  I nodded, avoiding Leidy’s stare, even when she coughed and Dante smacked her on the chest with both his hands after she started, turning the cough real if it wasn’t already.

  * * *

  Even from two blocks away, the rally hummed with voices and music. As we got closer, I felt a false chill: the humidity was low, even for December, and it made the morning feel cold enough that I was thrown off by the absence of the cloud of my breath—the face fog that had marked my every outdoor moment at Rawlings since October. It freaked me out to feel cold but see nothing.

  Despite the growing number of people ahead, most of the houses and apartment buildings we passed were dark and quiet, and I pictured all the hungover people behind the windows, still in bed, sheets pulled over their heads, greeting the new year with headaches stronger than the one hiding behind my eyes. As we walked, the clumps of posters and displays increased in density: chain-link fences showcased slogans on banners and photos of Ariel, all attached to the metal with curls of ribbon—the kind used to wrap presents. Some posters had fake flowers—roses, daisies—glued to their corners: others were heavy on glitter or puff paint. On one poster, a crooked row of American flag stickers separated the handwriting of a grown-up from the unsure print of a child, revealing the poster to be a family project. Tied up right next to that one, the work of another family: the words Welcome Home in tall bubble letters around a black-and-white photo of Ariel—the same photo on the shirt my mom made, which hung against my leg, threaded through a belt loop on my shorts. Someone had filled in Ariel’s brown eyes with an inexplicable blue, the artist having taken liberties with his appearance. The bubble letters were painted in with two kinds of green—the first green marker apparently running out halfway through the m in Welcome, a lighter green finishing the job. Stickers—this time, foil stars like the kind elementary school teachers put on A-plus work—framed the photo in a wobbly box. I imagined an adult’s hand wrapped around a child’s wrist, guiding their sticker-tipped finger despite a Let me do it whine, the frame closing in around Ariel’s face with each press. The handmade signs went on and on, up and down the block on both sides of the street, each one a kind of story. I was about to see into the next one when a voice I’d never heard before yelled my mom’s name.

  Mami stopped to let the woman hug her. The stranger floated inside another handmade T-shirt sporting a smaller shot of Ariel looking forlorn and the phrase BACK TO NO FUTURE? on it. She wore her brass-colored hair parted down the middle and hugging her face like brackets—a more processed-looking version of my mom’s style. They pulled apart and kissed each other on the cheek, exchanging hearty Feliz Año Nuevo greetings as they both turned to walk straight into the thickening crowd.

  When the woman noticed me following, she reached for my shoulder and said Feliz Año Nuevo to me but with a leftover smile. She leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, and I froze: even though I’d been doing it my whole life, to kiss a stranger in greeting now felt very weird. It was the inverse of what I’d first felt at Rawlings when I met Jaquelin. As this woman pulled away from me, she began talking as if I’d just interrupted some conversation.

  —Bueno yo no salí anoche, she said.

  —Me neither, my mom said. Too dangerous.

  —¡Ay, sí! she said. So many crazy people out for New Year’s. I’ll stay in my house to drink. No drunk drivers there. You see how many people they arrested? Four hundred DUIs! And that’s on the Palmetto nadamás.

  —Four hundred! my mom said.

  The woman nodded, but I had a harder time believing that large a number.

  —Are you sure it was just the Palmetto and not all the expressways in Miami? I said, my voice sounding dry, not ready to be awake. Four hundred’s just – that’s a lot.

  She sucked her teeth and said, I heard it this morning! On the news! They said it like eighteen times!

  —Hmmm, I said, nodding.

  —Y dicen que ese negro – ¿como se llama? – Puff Daddy? He was at South Beach and his security people made them shut down the club and take away everyone’s cameras.

  What club? Who is them? I wanted to ask her these questions but started with: Where’d you hear that?

  She opened her mouth and looked at me, then my mom, then said to her, What is she, the CIA?

  This is when it would’ve made sense for my mom to introduce us, to say, This is my daughter Lizet (or better yet: My daughter, Lizet, the one I told you about, the one away at college in New York, remember?). That Mami hadn’t told me who this woman was made me think I maybe wasn’t really there, but it also made me feel like a regular, like the woman and I already knew each other—of course we did!—from all the previous rallies. That couldn’t be true, but maybe she knew about me—well enough that my mom didn’t feel compelled to refresh her memory. Maybe she was my mother’s more preoccupied version of Rafael: You must be the smart one. I waited for some hint of this, needing to believe that Leidy was wrong just to keep walking. I tried to believe this woman already knew who I was as my mom laughed and said, Myra, you’re too much.

  Then Mami smiled at me, too, so I tried to remember if I’d met Myra at Thanksgiving, passed her on our way back to the apartment or seen her lingering outside the building next door. Myra screamed out some other woman’s name and waved her over—another A
riel T-shirt, this one with a huge Cuban flag, the star replaced by Ariel’s face. The new woman rubbed her arms and bent toward my mom, then Myra, then me, planting a kiss in the air by my cheek, the third in the line of automatic greetings.

  Mami had warned me not to come for her but for Ariel, and by then I saw why: she was not my mom here. She was Lourdes who made T-shirts, Lourdes who had friends I’d never met. She laughed at something the new woman said—a big laugh, one that seemed careful to match the ones around her. She reached forward and tugged the edge of this woman’s T-shirt to stretch it out and said, Oh, I really like this one—sounding years younger to me, a girl-voice almost, trying and hoping to fit in. Leidy’s freak-out must’ve been about this. She must’ve seen Mami against this new backdrop and wondered, Who the hell are you trying to be? But I recognized the rise in pitch as something else: the effort—the strain—of being a new version of yourself, a strain I knew. I held my spot by Mami in the little circle of talking women, convinced they knew by then that this friend of theirs, their Lourdes, was my mom—it never felt more obvious to me.

  And as more and more people arrived, I felt how easy it must’ve been for Mami, finally surrounded by something that seemed like love—or at the very least a shared sense of purpose—because I felt it too, standing in the street, the whole crowd shifting to allow cars to pass, each of us waving at the drivers. No one was hysterical: people laughed, found friends in the crowd, perked each other up by offering each other café in tiny plastic cups. The Ariel T-shirts, the flags—all of it was just a uniform that said, I belong here. I yanked my Ariel shirt from the belt loop and slipped it over my head, smoothing the wrinkles I’d made in it as best I could. It hung to my knees, so—bad as I knew it would look—I tucked the shirt into my shorts: I didn’t want the news portraying me as the weirdo Cuban protester refusing to wear pants.

  A man near the front of the crowd yelled that the house’s screen door was opening, but it was clearly still closed. No one came out, and I waited for my mom—who’d craned her neck between her friends’ heads to see Ariel’s house—to turn back around. I waited for her to see me in the shirt and to smile, to recognize me. The door stayed closed—no sign of anything. I waited for her to see how the shirt hung on me, to see that I understood what she was doing. I tugged at the shirt, made sure its message was clear. I waited and I waited.

  Once I saw him, live and real to me for the first time, I forgave my mom for never turning around: Ariel, perched high on his uncle’s shoulders and waving—both arms up and bent at the elbows, his hands a blur—wearing a Santa hat and squinting into the sun. Or maybe the pained smile and almost-closed eyes were his reflex against the sudden wall of noise that hit him, that must’ve filled his bird chest to bursting. That first glimpse of Ariel: chubbier in the face than the pictures on all those T-shirts showed him to be, he was an elf, his ears glowing from the sunlight behind him. There was no way I could’ve heard his laugh, but I remember his laughter, the high notes of it spiking out over us. His skin radiated the joy of tans from playing outside, of having a ready line of people to push him on the swing. His uncle’s hands gripped his knees, and it seemed to me this was not to keep him from falling, but to keep him from floating away.

  I say all this because I felt in that moment the power he held and wielded by accident. He was more than a cute little boy. I had the very strong desire to carry him myself, to fold him into a little ball that fit in the circle of my arms. Hidden behind the pebbles of his baby-toothed grin, you sensed a loss so profound it made anyone want to hold him, to cradle and rock him and say you were so sorry, over and over again. For so many people there, he was a mirror, some version or idea of yourself, some Baby You, fresh off a boat or a plane and alone but still hopeful that what’s been set into motion around you is just fine. I wanted to lift him to my face, to ask him what it felt like to go outside and see yourself staring back at you from the chests of so many strangers. I say all this because if it wasn’t for me wanting to see my mom’s face more than I wanted to see his, I could’ve stayed in that trance—happy to be among a tribe, each one of us tapping into the love the person beside us radiated toward Ariel—for as long as anyone. I say all this because I recognized then how things could get out of hand.

  Someone knocked into me, pushed me forward, then another push, and suddenly I was pressed up against Myra’s back (she’d let my mom, shorter than her, slide in front). Myra wasn’t as easy to jostle as I was, and soon enough my face smashed up against the back of her T-shirt. She held her ground by trying to step backward—right onto my foot. She planted it on the outside of my sneaker, managing to find the one blister I had from walking in heels the night before—I hadn’t even known it was there until water first hit it during that morning’s shower. Now it sent a charge of pain over my foot. It hurt, but I was grateful for Leidy’s advice to wear real shoes. People yelled in Spanish and English, all hoping to say the question that would catch the uncle’s attention: Did you stay up until midnight to greet the new year? What have you heard from the government? Then I heard my mom’s voice, just a few feet in front of me: Where is Caridaylis? How is she?

  The government question won out over the others.

  —We’ll know more Tuesday, the uncle said as if we were one person, a friendly neighbor talking to another friendly neighbor, nothing at all weird about the mass of us hanging out in front of his house.

  —We’re talking to the lawyer all the time, he said.

  He shook the boy’s sneaker-clad foot and said, Ariel, you wanted to say something?

  —Happy New Year, Ariel said, suddenly shy with his voice.

  Many in the crowd said it back. I didn’t: I’d slinked around Myra, favoring my non-blistered foot, to get a clear view of my mom’s face. Mami didn’t say it back, either.

  Her mouth threw me off the most—lips bent in a practiced, forced smile showing more bottom teeth than top. She looked like she was holding her face for a photo, stale lines fanning away from her eyes, which ticked back and forth, searching somewhere behind Ariel. I’d expected some glow, one reflecting what Ariel gave off, what I’d seen in him, but she looked used to this moment, content but close to bored. But then, as all around me rose new cheers of welcome, my mom’s face broke open, her mouth cracking the mask-smile and coming back to life with one that reached her ears, tears rimming and glossing over her eyes. She stood on her toes, lifted her chin to see over the crowd. I sometimes forgot that she was still young, still two years away from forty, the flicker of gray that might’ve winked from her hair by then hidden under the dye job and the chunky blond highlights. Leidy was almost a year old by the time Mami was my age; she was weeks away from learning she was pregnant with me. Happy New Year, my mom yelled, and she raised her hand to wave, a strong smooth arm: she looked too young to have daughters as old as us.

  Close to my ear, someone yelled Cari! and lifted a bangle-clad wrist in greeting. So I understood before I even saw her that my mom’s new face was for Caridaylis, the uncle’s daughter who’d been assigned, more or less by default, to fill the role of Ariel’s mother.

  I’d never seen her in person either, but when I took in her pretty round face, her tan shoulders under the straps of a white tank top, I had to look away—up at Ariel, then into the sky, at the dark shadows bellying from the clouds. Because I almost recognized her. Because she was, to me—and I hate that I still haven’t thought of a better yet equally accurate way to put it—painfully generic, the quintessential girl from Miami, a girl who could’ve gone to my high school and blended in so seamlessly I would’ve flipped past her picture in the yearbook without really registering it: with her small hoop earrings, the gold chain from all the photos still around her neck, her thick, straightened hair and her long bangs skirting her face, her arms reaching up behind her uncle to take Ariel from his shoulders and carry him herself. Her regularness struck me as tragic, because to the people surrounding me she’d never be regular again. Ariel made her special;
everyone around me saw it that way. But I must’ve been broken somehow, because as Ariel climbed onto her, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck and tucking his head into her shoulder, he lost whatever specialness I’d seen on him. He was now some kid being held by some girl from Miami. I listened harder to the crowd as they yelled We love you and said they were praying and lighting candles, but I couldn’t get it back, couldn’t see Ariel the way I had seconds before, because I couldn’t give that feeling to her.

  Caridaylis sent a little wave—four fingers folding down to meet her palm in a curl, three or four times—right at me, and my face felt hot. She’d caught me somehow, sensed that I saw through to her secret that she was a regular person, but my mom’s hand flicked ahead of me, waving back. Caridaylis was waving to my mom—she even mouthed, Hi Lourdes, which killed my hope that maybe I was wrong about the wave—bequeathing for a second her specialness to my mother by singling her out. She knew my mother’s name. How could that be true? I wanted to launch over the fence and shake her, ask her why: Why on earth do you know my mother’s name? She rested the hand she’d waved on Ariel’s head.

  Mami finally remembered me then, grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, making me step on the toes of people crowding the short distance between us. She clenched the meat of my upper arm and said, Did you see that? There’s something so special in her. God bless her, she is trying so hard.